The Brooklyn Rail

William Burroughs wrote about “Control” as an entity that must be engaged and vanquished, or at least contested. Burroughs’s sense of “Control” was as a parasitic system of power that works through the virus of language, mass media, bureaucratic structures, and technology. He was a devotee of Wilhelm Reich, who devised actual techniques for psychologically subverting Control.

People now speak of the current conditions in the US as being “out of control,” even as we are all under the sway of an entity, a regime, that seeks to control everything, but does it within an environment of gross incompetence and chaos. In “The Limits of Control,” Burroughs wrote, “A government is never more dangerous than when embarking on a self-defeating or downright suicidal course.”

This year, we had planned to celebrate 250 years of American independence and democracy, but the US has really only been a multiracial democracy for 61 years, since the Voting Rights Act and the Immigration Act were passed in 1965. And both of these landmark acts are currently under direct attack by Trump.

Donald Trump came of age in the 1960s, but was always an enemy of the sixties counterculture. For him, sex was always predatory, he didn’t drink or do drugs, and he preferred the Village People to rock and roll. He only loved money and power, and thought peace and love were strictly for “losers.”

In America, the political pendulum never tarries long in equilibrium, in the center, where the energy is lowest. The current swing to the Right has not yet reached its greatest amplitude, but when it does, it will swing back to the Left with great force.

But before that happens, the corrupt regimes must be toppled and prosecuted, and that seems to be beginning to happen in many other places in the world. In England, the King’s brother has been arrested for “misconduct in public office,” after being stripped of his royal titles last October when his close ties with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were revealed in the Trump-Epstein Files. We are now in a peculiar time, when America, that broke away from the British monarchy (Thomas Paine: “in America, the law is King”) is demanding less accountability of our own president than the Brits are now demanding of the King’s brother!

In South Korea, the former president, Yoon Suk Yeol, was sentenced to life in prison for trying to declare martial law and using troops to blockade the National Assembly building to keep opposition politicians from voting against it. Norway’s former Prime Minister Thorbjorn Jagland has been charged with corruption. Last year, the ex-President of France Nicolas Sarkozy got five years for illegal campaign financing, and two former presidents of Peru were sentenced to eleven years in prison for conspiracy to commit rebellion and fourteen years for bribery, respectively. Do we have a King who is above the law in the US, or not?

On February 20th, Heather Cox Richardson demonstrated once again how important it is to have a great historian commenting on current events, when she gave a succinct and forceful account of Trump’s debt to the German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985). Richardson pointed out that Trump could have gone to Congress to get legislation on his tariffs passed, since Republicans control both houses and are ready and willing to do his bidding on anything, but he preferred instead to ignore Congress in order to further assert his plenary power.

It was always clear, though, that Trump’s reliance on tariffs was mostly about seizing power. Trump’s advisors appear to be using the strategy of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, who opposed liberal democracy, in which the state enables individuals to determine their own fate. Instead, he argued that true democracy erases individual self-determination by making the mass of people one with the state and exercising their will through state power. That uniformity requires getting rid of opposition. Schmitt theorized that politics is simply about dividing people into friends and enemies and using the power of the state to crush enemies.

Much of Schmitt’s philosophy centered around the idea that in a nation that is based in a constitution and the rule of law, power belongs to the man who can exploit emergencies that create exceptions to the constitutional order, enabling him to exercise power without regard to the law. Trump—who almost certainly has not read Schmitt himself—asserted this view on August 26, 2025: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger—and it is in danger in the cities—I can do it.”

Let’s hope this Supreme Court decision is a change in direction of the court and not just a spasm of nostalgia for the rule of law in America by what Trump called the “fools and lap dogs” of this Supreme Court. It now appears that ICE is moving out of the cities (after the murderous debacle of Minneapolis) and into the countryside and the suburbs, where they expect to meet with less resistance. They may be sorely mistaken.